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Taking a closer look
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08/02/2008
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Internet security threats continue to evolve. Cyber warfare can now be added to hacking and organised crime – stealing information for competitive advantage.
Estonia suffered large scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in April and May 2007, whereby government, banking, telecom companies and media websites were deliberately overloaded with traffic. Such attacks could have disastrous effects on a large market economy. According to BT, 90% of all UK financial transactions transit its network.
To detect such attacks, service providers monitor traffic and compare it to a collected traffic history. If the traffic’s characteristics differ sufficiently from the norm, it is routed to equipment that filters the malicious traffic. The mitigation device must inspect packets carefully to identify if they are malicious since not all abnormal traffic patterns are threats. For example, network traffic will surge at the start of a soccer match or when a network failure causes traffic to be rerouted.
Cyber security is one reason for a growing interest among equipment makers and chip vendors in packet inspection at line rates.
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Author
Roy Rubenstein
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